My Sundance Day 1 (though it was actually Day 3 for some): "Boy" shows maturity, "Catfish" makes a splash, "Splice" should be torn to pieces.
My first day at Sundance
went pretty smoothly, especially considering that I had to wake up at 4 AM to
catch my plane and that they had to make an emergency landing when someone fell
seriously ill over the Midwest. I didn't get into Park City until 2 PM, yet
still managed to catch four films and get back to my hotel at a relatively
reasonable hour. Intermittent text messages inform me that at 2:15 AM the
B-Side/FantasticFest karaoke slam is still raging, but I think that perhaps I
will wait until tomorrow to hit the parties.
First film up today was
"Boy," a genuinely charming narrative feature from New Zealand filmmaker Taika
Waititi. We screened Waititi's short film "Two Cars, One Night" in 2008, and
this feature is somewhat based on some of the characters and scenario that
worked exquisitely well in the short. Set in the 80's, "Boy" tells the story of
an imaginative but restless adolescent boy living in Waihau Bay who must deal
with the return from prison of his irresponsible father (played winningly by Waititi
himself). The film is charming without ever becoming too cute, broad without
ever becoming trite, and it compares well to somewhat similar films like Son of
Rambow and Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys. I found it much less forced and
substantially more amusing than either of those films, and the response here
has been generally positive, except for a rather luke-warm review in Variety. Next up was Catfish, which simply blew me away. A genuinely shocking and suspenseful true-life story involving one of the most unusual instances of Facebook stalking yet documented, Catfish is so entertainingly twisty that many here at Sundance are still arguing over whether or not the doc is legitimately non-fiction (it is).
If you are in Park City this week, GO SEE "CATFISH." It just does so many things right and offers so much to talk about that it demands to be seen. It is vibrantly of-the-moment and almost magically relevant to debates swirling about a half dozen different issues of our time, some big and some small. It never shies away from the idea that our culture is obsessed with self-documentation and social networks, but Joost, Schulman and Pontier wisely refrain from slowing down the story with any meandering discussion of the issue--they simply let the story tell itself and leave the audience to ask each other questions after the credits roll. It is a very personal story but it is much too entertaining and briskly told to be accused of being indulgent. It features some simple but highly innovative visual storytelling mechanisms that manage to convey life as it is lived online without resorting to irritating animation or quirky contrivances. And yet, despite it's various accomplishments, "Catfish" leaves you because it manages to end on a note of bittersweet empathy that rings true despite the freaky string of events that preceded. "Catfish" is the talk of the town and deservedly so.
I followed up Catfish with Chico Colvard's "Family Affair," a bleak but strikingly honest documentary about the filmmaker's tortured family history. Colvard accidentally shot his sister with his father's rifle when he was a young child, and this incident set in motion a series of events and revelations that soon led to his father being sent to jail for molesting each of his daughters. Well told and courageously inquiring, the film benefits tremendously from Colvard's willingness to show even the darkest and most unnerving sides of each story; at one point, his sisters even admit that they often enjoyed their sexual encounters with their father and that it was actually a welcome respite from his physical and emotional abusiveness. Neither they nor their brother think that this in any way excuses their father's behavior, but allowing his sisters to speak candidly shows that Colvard's goal was to explore emotional complexity, not excuse or further condemn his family for their well-documented failings.
Finally I grabbed a beer with Mike Tully of Hammer and Nail and Jake Perlin of BAM and then went to see a spectacularly awful sci-fi horror film called "Splice," starring Adrian Brody. Written and Directed by Vincenzo Natali, "Splice" tells the unlikely tale of two of the stupidest scientists on the face of the Earth splicing animal DNA together with human DNA and accidentally producing terrifying creatures, one of which runs amok and endangers all mankind (sort of). The audience at my press and industry screening sat silently through the silly first half of the film, but when Brody made an odd face and proclaimed, "Elsa, those were not mysterious tumors inside her body---THOSE WERE FULLY FUNCTIONAL AMPHIBIOUS LUNGS!" I couldn't help but burst out laughing and immediately the rest of the crowd joined in, and from then on a good time was had by all. Laughs could be heard throughout the auditorium, even as Sarah Polley was being raped and impregnated by a fish-bird-frog-man-hybrid (spoiler alert! Oops, too late).
Brody in particular seems lost from start to finish, never appearing sure if he should ham it up for laughs or tone it down in a last ditch effort to retain some little bit of self-respect. Talking to the crowd after the film, it was apparent that not one of us was sure if the film was intended to be campy or if it was merely accidentally hilarious, but clearly the overall vibe in the crowd was not good. Jake recommended that the film skip standard theatrical altogether and go straight to midnight movie screenings. This film is in trouble. That being said, I can't say I am not looking forward to TV ads that feature the sentence, "Academy Award Winner Adrian Brody in....SPLICE!"
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